Sometimes you just have to slow down. It might be due to a physical condition, overwhelming events, or an emotional reaction. For me right now, it’s the last two items on the list, prompted by Mom’s death less than two months ago. I continue to write, do my workouts, make my meetings and appointments, clean the house, feed the cat, feed myself, but none of it with my usual level of energy and engagement. The one place I seem to be functioning normally is the garden.
It really needs you at this time of year.
So true, 9. Lots of vulnerable new plants are emerging from seed or being transplanted from pots. The weather, not yet settled between spring and summer, swings widely between highs ranging from the 90s to the 60s, from gusty winds to dead calm, and today gains the last expansive minutes of daylight to the Summer Solstice (7:42 PM Pacific Time). Watering, weeding, mowing, even the occasional bit of harvest:
In the garden: Miniature blueberries.
So tasty, but so tiny!
I know, Lily, I have to put on my 2.0 readers to pick the darn things! This morning, for the first time ever I saw a raccoon in the garden. It must be attracted by the fruit, and possibly displaced by the 27- house development going in down the street. If it’s hungry, it’s sure to show up for the coming apricot harvest. It’s a heavy one this year:
In the garden: An abundance of apricots will be ripe by mid-July.
Last weekend I transplanted six Tasmanian Chocolate tomato starts grown from seed. There are six more to go in after the weekend’s too windy weather and before the next round of too hot.
In the garden: Come on, little tomatoes!
Another specialty grown from seed: miniature butternut squash that will weigh 1.5 to 2 pounds at harvest, the perfect size for a one or two person household:
In the garden: A young butternut squash.
My favorite raised bed hosts multi-color bell peppers and shelling peas, with some volunteer sunflowers and borage that will attract pollinators:
Blog 531: Peppers and peas. I love the flexible pea trellis!
That’s a lot of stuff!
And there’s more- -snow peas, purple bush beans, carrots, radishes, beets. By mid to late summer I hope to have a cutting garden of bachelor buttons, yellow zinnias and cutting-appropriate sunflowers. Those got in later than I’d hoped, given travel and various volunteer and performing projects that cost me some days here and there. Something to look forward to, right?
In late spring and early summer the garden is a strong metaphor for new life and growth. I really need that kind of replenishment now, loading up my emotional war chest, as it were. Because life itself is as volatile as the weather. The trick is learning how to surf both good and bad, both happy and sad.
And, in the meantime, create a patch of beauty and good things to eat.
In the garden: Handsome garden cat makes the experience complete!
Very impressive! Be kind to yourself.
Thank you, Margo. One kindness I will perpetrate is buying a chest freezer to preserve all those apricots!
Apricots are my very favorite fruit. My tree was loaded this spring. However, the winds and the rains took most of them to the ground. I had a handful to eat for about two weeks, and that will have to carry me through until next year.
By that time, however, I probably will have to drive back to Winters, California to find lugs and lugs of apricots for canning.
The winters stay too cold for too long in order for apricots to be successful in Reno
My apricots are practically raining, Judy! Glad you had two weeks of them to enjoy.